The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon

Midwifery and Life in the Late 1700’s

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This book of historical fiction is about Martha Ballard, a midwife in Hallowell, Maine in the late 1700s. Martha was unique for the time in many ways. One of them was her ability to read and write. Thanks to those skills, she kept an extensive diary with daily entries that document everyday life in that time period. It also enumerates all the births she attended as a midwife. She proudly reports that no woman in her care ever died in childbirth, an amazing statistic for her long career especially in that era. Her journal entries cover the time period 1785-1812.

The main pregnancy followed in the novel is that of Rebecca Foster whose condition is the result of a horrific rape. TWO men are charged in the attack, Joshua Burgess, and Joseph North. As a legal case proceeds in this regard, the complications are many. First of all, the book opens with the death of Joshua Burgess. Did he drown or was he murdered first and then thrown in the river? And beyond that, Joseph North is a judge in the area, which makes it difficult for Rebecca Foster to make her complaint public.

As The Frozen River proceeds, the mystery surrounding Joshua Burgess’s death is resolved and the despicable nature of Joseph North is explored at length. Ultimately, Joseph North is brought to justice in a surprising way.

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I don’t want to give too much away, so that’s all I will say about the novel, but here are a few things of interest that came from researching the book after I finished it.

• It was interesting to me how many women were pregnant out of wedlock in this novel. In an interview with NPR, the author says, “Four in ten first pregnancies in Martha’s day were conceived out of wedlock – 40%. Only one to two percent, or two of those babies, were born out of wedlock. So, you had lots of shotgun weddings. And you had lots of – shall we say – nine-pound, premature babies. Like, oh, he’s two months early, but look, he’s huge.”
• Evidently the author’s M.O. in writing historical fiction is to include an endnote that details her research. In these pages, we learn that the assault on Rebecca Foster was a lot more horrific than depicted in the novel. Frankly, had the author written the rape as it really occurred, I wonder who would believe such a thing?
• The world knows about Martha Ballard thanks to a book from 1990 called A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. The book is based on Martha’s diaries. It won a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis for a PBS documentary film. The diaries consisted of more than 1400 pages. Ulrich is a Harvard Professor and an historian who specializes in early America and in the history of women.
• Martha Ballard is the great-aunt of Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross. She is also the great-great-grandmother of Mary Hobart, one of the first female Physicians in the United States.

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I can’t close without sharing an indelible quote from the book. It is uttered twice, first by Joseph North as he is about to rape a woman. He says, “You are going to be quiet about this. While I’m doing it, and afterward. You’ll not say a word, because no one will believe you.”

The author repeats that line in the next paragraph and elaborates: “No one will believe you. It’s the line spoken by every man who has ever used a woman in this way. The trouble is that so often they are right.”

How odd – and terrible – that a book about the early 1800s is such a timely tale today.

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Click here to learn more about The Frozen River on Amazon.

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Looking for your next book to read? Please consider my newest book, Chai on Life. “Chai” is a mystical word in Hebrew. It is pronounced “high” making this book High on Life with a Jewish slant. It is available wherever books are sold and on Amazon.